Banana

by Dan Koeppel

  It was an era when transportation was modern enough to slowly immerse the world in new and exotic plant and animal species, though commerce, which would require speedy cargo vessels, was decades away. Instead, overseas naturalists would carefully package their specimens and send them back to England or elsewhere in the empire via a coordinated network of colonial naval and merchant vessels. Many times, the samples didn’t arrive intact. If not lost, they were often so disturbed that their point of origin, along with other identifying documentation essential for taxonomic work, was forever lost.

  How Telfair received what would become known as the Cavendish banana—as the banana—isn’t exactly known. Records only give the fruit’s arrival date, 1826, and a vague origin in China (the Cavendish is still known, in a few places, as the “Chinese” banana). He might have received it through his trading network, or it could have been brought over by Chinese workers, who were being lured, under indenture, to the island’s sugar industry. Mauritius shared a climate with coastal East Africa. It was ideal for bananas, though just how much of the fruit Telfair grew, or whether he considered it as anything but a botanic curiosity, is a mystery.

  Three years after he received his first banana plants, Telfair sent several living samples back to England. One of the minor puzzles of banana history is who received them. Philip Keep Reynolds’s 1927 book, The Banana: Its History, Cultivation, and Place Among Staple Foods (published in Boston, with the assistance of the United Fruit education department), identifies the receiver of the fruit as “Barclay of Burryhill” and the date of the fruit’s arrival as 1829. Other accounts list the town as Berryhill. Those tracing banana history have never been sure exactly who Barclay was. And there is no town in England that goes by either version of the name. But there is a place called Bury Hill in Surrey, not a village, but an estate, once sprawling, covered in gardens and statuary. Bury Hill was owned by a beer magnate, a Robert Barclay, who had a penchant for funding global plant-collecting expeditions and who is known, even today, for introducing several tropical floral varieties—notably, the azalea and rhododendron—to the gardening public. There is no written record of him ever having received a banana from Telfair, so historians of the fruit never made the connection. But according to historian Marina Carter, who is writing a biography of the colonizing plant collector, a more general link does exist in Telfair’s records, still housed on Mauritius. In 1820 Telfair noted the shipment of a parcel to a horticultural correspondent in southeast England. The package, which contained hibiscus (not bananas), was delivered to the Bury Hill estate. This earlier link between Telfair and Bury Hill makes it likely that the Cavendish sent to the unidentified Barclay and nonexistent Burryhill were in fact received by the flower-loving brewery magnate.

  ROBERT BARCLAY NEVER HAD A CHANCE to distribute or grow the strange plant he’d received from his distant correspondent; he died one year after the banana arrived. His son, Arthur, took over the estate and the family business. Though the gardens were maintained, they stopped being a hub for exotic horticultural interchange. (The Barclay gardens continued to operate until the 1930s, when the estate, like many in England during the Depression, was broken up. Recently, local homeowners have found vestiges of Barclay’s greenhouses and are attempting to restore some of them.) Following his death, Barclay’s plants were purchased by the sixth Duke of Devonshire, who had his own affinity for exotic fauna, growing specimens in his private greenhouses at Chatsworth, a sprawling landholding in Derbyshire that is now part of Britain’s Peak District National Park. The property has been occupied by the family since the sixteenth century, and today is home to the twelfth duke. He shares a name with Chatsworth’s fifth master: Cavendish.

  The Derbyshire property and the people who lived there are famous for many things. Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned on the estate grounds during the sixteenth century. The fourth duke was a prime minister of England. The current occupant, Peregrine Cavendish, is the Queen’s official representative at the Ascot Race-course. His father was well-known for heaping scorn on animal rights activists seeking to ban fox hunts.

  But William Cavendish, the nobleman who oversaw the construction of the property’s magnificent rock gardens, nurseries, and arboretums, is better known for his lusty lifestyle—he was nicknamed the Bachelor Duke—than as the namesake of the single most cultivated fruit on the planet. In 1836 botanist Aylmer Bourke Lambert, a former Cavendish employee, presented an antique Chinese drawing of a banana to a London meeting of the Linnaean Society, the natural history conclave—still functioning in both Britain and the United States—that took its name from the Swedish taxonomist who first classified bananas. Lambert believed that the fruit in the illustration was the same one he’d seen at the duke’s estate. Lambert proposed to name the plant after the duke: Musa cavendishii. A society endorsement of a plant or animal’s proposed nomenclature made adoption of that name almost a sure thing; the banana we eat—the endangered banana—was officially titled a year later, when a color painting and a scientific description of the “Cavendish Banana” was published in the Magazine of Botany.

  TODAY, CHATSWORTH IS A TOURIST ATTRACTION. While the duke and his family live in private quarters (if they’re home; they own eight other residences throughout the world), the public peruses the visitors shop’s fine china and garden furniture, and brings picnics to free concerts held on the grounds every summer. They also visit the gardens—a fifteen-foot-high bronze rabbit, a recent acquisition, is currently the facility’s nonhorticultural centerpiece. That this is the adoptive home of our banana—another stop on the fruit’s ever-more-sprawling ten thousand–year journey, and the place where the original ancestor of our lunchbox staple was likely first tasted by people living in the cooler climates of the north—isn’t acknowledged at all.

  THE CAVENDISH TRAVERSED THE INDIAN AND PACIFIC oceans, but it had yet to make it across the Atlantic. It would ultimately arrive in our hemisphere by several routes, all of them starting from Mauritius, via Surrey and Chatsworth. As it traveled, it was joined by other varieties of the Cavendish. As the original Cavendish gained popularity, several other cultivars—all genetically identical but differing mostly in size—were imported from the collections of other plant enthusiasts (all are still grown today). The Grande Naine (Big Dwarf ) is most widely grown and the one that usually reaches American tables; it is well suited for Caribbean plantations since it yields relatively large fruit from relatively low trees—a desirable attribute in places susceptible to hurricanes. (If banana diseases are insidious, bringing total destruction at a progressive crawl, high winds are like a sudden explosion. In 1998, the Honduran banana industry was almost completely wiped out by Hurricane Mitch. Eighty percent of the country’s plantations were destroyed.) A second Cavendish cultivar, called Williams, is popular in Australia, with direct lineage to the Chatsworth greenhouses—it is named after John Williams, a missionary who carried Chatsworth suckers from Britain to Samoa. (Easily transported, bananas ensured that no matter what other tribulations a conversion-minded proselytizer might encounter, starvation would not likely be one of them.) A Williams colleague carried descendants of the Samoa plant to Fiji and then to what were then known as the Friendly Islands (today’s Tonga). These South Pacific locals were already growing bananas, the fe’i variety, and they took to the Cavendish instantly. By 1855 the Telfair line had crossed hemispheres again, becoming a local favorite in Tahiti, Hawaii, and New Guinea. Other Cavendish types had reached Egypt and South Africa.

  The Cavendish circled the globe. But it skipped the Americas. In the United States, the fruit was unheard of. Even the plantain, consumed in Mexico since the days of the conquistadores, was unknown in the chillier locales above the Rio Grande. While samples were occasionally received by horticultural dilettantes and wealthy collectors, the banana wasn’t—and couldn’t be—exported in large quantities. There was no need for the starchy green banana in parts of the world that had potatoes. And the Cavendish fruit wasn’t tough enough to
be carried, in any significant quantity, over great distances. People like Telfair, Barclay, and Cavendish would have been amazed—if not completely unbelieving—if they’d been told that in less than five decades the fruit would spread far beyond its natural range, and not just by ones and twos but by millions.

  CHAPTER 25

  Falling Apart

  BY THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY, United Fruit was buckling under its own weight. It was looking less like a business concern and more like a staggering colonial power. The Guatemala escapade seemed especially ill-conceived, even if the banana giant felt it needed the land Arbenz had attempted to take over, as a hedge against spreading disease. For the most part, what United Fruit had accomplished was more about foreign policy than commerce, and changing times had made the supply-and-demand controls of international politics less important to what Americans ate than cultural forces within our own country. Tastes were changing. For the first time, banana consumption was declining, from a postwar high of just over 6 million bunches in 1947 to a low of 4.5 million nine years later, according to a Harvard Business School study. Potato chips and canned fruit cocktail were taking over.

  Yet United Fruit’s hunger for territory was unabated. The company’s Panama disease “strategy” of flooding, replanting, and breaking new ground was failing to even maintain level output: By the mid-1950s, according to historian Marcelo Bucheli, the number of tons of bananas each acre yielded had dropped by more than half in some banana-producing nations.

  There was a domino effect associated with Guatemala, but it wasn’t what the banana giant intended. The fruit company’s favored status had been restored, but the operation caused fear and outrage in neighboring countries. They began to chafe at United Fruit’s dominance. They’d also learned the lessons of the Arbenz episode. United Fruit would still exert significant control over many of these countries, especially Honduras, but as the McCarthy era ended and the hottest spots of the cold war moved to Southeast Asia, small signs of independence—legislation that increased workers’ rights and even the creation of some independent banana producers—emerged. (None of this meant peace for Central America, however, where civil wars, dictatorships, and right-wing governments, propped up by the U.S., were the norm through the 1980s.)

  Even our own government seemed to be having mixed feelings about the banana giant. Less than two years after Arbenz was deposed, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against United Fruit. The reason for the action seems especially odd: “The Federal government had charged that United Fruit had obtained control of almost all land in Central and South America used for banana growing,” Bucheli writes. United Fruit didn’t deny the claim; it argued that the U.S. government had no authority over foreign operations—that these land-ownership issues were the responsibility of local governments. Attempts to break up the world’s largest banana grower continued through the early 1960s, when it was forced to divest itself of its railroad holdings in banana-growing countries and its supermarket distribution network in the United States. The final settlement also forced the company to sell some of the land it owned. Its first choice for offloading was Guatemala. The government’s newly mixed attitude toward United Fruit, which it had previously promoted with as much fervor as it advanced (and continues to advance, to the present day) the interests of U.S. oil companies, was a huge policy change, though there was no clear reason or consistency to the levels of support and opposition in those shifting foreign, trade, and economic policies.

  AT TIMES, THE COMPANY’S BEHAVIOR, too, was especially irrational. In 1957 it claimed to have beaten Panama disease in Costa Rica for a second time, reopening a plantation near Golfito on the Pacific coast. The New York Times reported that all of the company’s “acreage has now been rehabilitated.” It wasn’t the case. Golfito was reinfected within months. Top-heavy and distracted by its own size, in a state of both amnesia—it seemed to forget that its mission was to sell bananas—and denial, United Fruit clung to the Gros Michel despite failure after failure of the attempts to protect it from the blight. United Fruit was no longer invincible. It had been beaten by itself, through greed and ego—but mostly it had been defeated by nature. The disease it sowed had overtaken it.

  It didn’t have to be that way. And there was another banana company that knew it.

  STANDARD FRUIT WAS SMALLER THAN UNITED FRUIT—it never controlled more than 20 percent of the U.S. banana market—but it had a similar history. The company was started in 1899 by a pair of Sicilian immigrants. Salvador D’Antoni was a sometime smuggler and gun runner who operated mostly off the northern coast of Honduras. Joseph Vaccaro, who’d later corner the Southern ice market, was a New Orleans–based fruit distributor. When D’Antoni’s first shipment of bananas—grown on the island of Roatan, near the coast of current-day Belize, then known as British Honduras—was snapped up by eager consumers, Vaccaro, like his northern counterpart Andrew Preston and future rival Samuel Zemurray, jumped at the opportunity. After partnering with D’Antoni, Vaccaro Brothers and Company became the largest banana grower in northern Honduras, centered around the port city of La Ceiba.

  Vaccaro’s enterprise quickly became a scaled-down version of United Fruit, building seaports, railroads, and communications facilities. Vaccaro copied another United Fruit tactic as well: using tough, intimidating, and sometimes bloody methods to maintain control over growing areas. In order to gain working capital for railroad building, Vaccaro enlisted the help of local merchants, who—excited by the banana gold rush—put up both cash and their land in return for shares of the newly formed Vaccaro Brothers and Company. By 1903 the company was earning huge profits, and the investors began to demand their rightful portion. Instead, according to Honduran author Antonio Canelas, writing in La Ceiba, sus raíces y su historia (La Ceiba, its Roots and its History), Vaccaro ordered the town’s city hall to be burned down, along with any records of land ownership and business agreements contained inside. With the support of the Honduran government, the banana importer was able to make a blank slate of the region—over which he took control. By 1925 the company had become United Fruit’s most formidable competitor, with a new name—the Standard Fruit and Steamship Company—and an operational distribution network in the United States. United Fruit was an early investor in the company but was forced to divest itself after regulators objected. Standard became the larger banana grower’s “powerful and alert rival,” according to Frederick Upham Adams, ensuring that the company had “absolutely no control over retail prices.” (Adams, whose writing was generally slanted in favor of the banana giant, was correct in his description of the smaller company but not in his claim that the monetary value of bananas was beyond the ability of the Octopus to sway. The competition tended to be over markets rather than cost.)

  Until the 1950s, Standard Fruit remained an operational clone of the larger grower. Panama disease hit its plantations in 1910. Abandonment began four years later, and the company also began acquiring territory, moving growing areas farther and farther inland.

  But Standard Fruit’s smaller size amplified the crisis. It didn’t have a half-dozen countries and tens of thousands of acres of untouched land to clear and transform into banana farms. The cost of managing remote plantations on substandard land threatened to price the company, today known as Dole, out of business.

  In the end, that hardship turned out to be the smaller banana company’s biggest advantage. It knew that it soon would run out of places to grow Gros Michel. That would mean an end to the enterprise—unless it found a replacement banana. In 1927 it began searching for a new, Panama disease–resistant fruit. The candidates it tested were no different from the ones United Fruit had been rejecting. But because Vaccaro’s company had more to lose, it looked further into each breed. In January 1927, 108 Lacatan banana plants—related to the Philippine favorite—were planted. By September they were ready for harvest. The Lacatan that were good were great, just as they are today, but there were numerous problems: The dark
er-colored bananas required rigidly regulated ripening, using ethylene gas, the natural vapor that fruits give off as they ripen. The presence of the gas is a trigger for the ripening process, which is why, if you want green bananas to turn yellow quickly, you can put them in a brown paper bag with an overripe apple. The apple gives off ethylene, and the bananas mature. But banana distributors in the United States were unwilling to implement such methods: With United Fruit delivering thousands of healthy Gros Michel bunches to U.S. ports, it didn’t seem necessary. Lacatan had other problems, according to Standard Fruit researcher H. H. V. Hord. It was very sensitive to temperature and humidity, and small variations could cause individual fruit to drop off the bunches during transport. Despite this, Standard began shipping small quantities of Lacatan to the United States. There was nothing else to do with the land it owned.

  THE NEXT BANANA the company tried was the Dwarf Cavendish, a smaller relative of the breed that would ultimately replace the Gros Michel. This pint-sized fruit had better ripening characteristics than Lacatan, though it had what Hord described as an “ashy” color. The fruit also bruised easily. But it grew even better than Lacatan, and like that variety, became part of Standard Fruit’s product line.

  The company even attempted to market a man-made banana, shipping the IC2 developed in Trinidad to the United States in 1944. By 1950 nearly half a million bunches were exported from Honduras to New Orleans. The fruit resisted both Panama disease and Sigatoka, and possessed the hardiness needed for the long journeys from the tropics to supermarkets. But IC2 was hard to grow—it stumbled in anything less than top-quality soil—and when later generations of the bred banana began succumbing to Panama disease, Standard Fruit halted shipments.